Links for 2010-12-15

"The goal of the study -- which is entirely to the good -- is to encourage colleges to base resource allocation decisions on actual effectiveness, rather than on what sounds good or what has usually been done. The authors break out two-year and four-year sectors -- thank you -- and actually define their variables. (Notably, the productivity decline over the past forty years has been far more dramatic in the four-year sector than in the two-year sector.) Even better, they acknowledge that most of the research done on various programs are done on those programs in isolation, rather than in comparison with each other. If we're serious about dealing with limited resources, we have to acknowledge that money spent on program A is money not available to be spent on program B. It's not enough to show that a given program helps; it needs to help more than its alternatives would have."

"Whenever I told Donald E. Westake I wanted to interview him about his complete canon, he just shrugged, not really interested.  He loved to talk about anything but his own work (at least with me; maybe with other professionals he talked shop). 

So I didn't get to interview him, but there are 92 emails from Don saved on my hard drive.  Perhaps I should have conducted my interview as a written questionnaire!  He wrote as easily as most of us speak.

What follows is hardly everything Westlake published. Diehards should investigate the Wikipedia entry and Giovanni Resta's website to discover what's not here.  However, this list annotates all of Donald E. Westlake's major fiction, his lone book of reportage, and three important essays.  For fun, I have starred (****) my favorites."